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        <p><b>Overview</b></p>

        <p>
            Heurist is a web service which captures and manages
            information about many different types of item - web bookmarks, bibliographic
            references, maps, people, events, images, projects, objects etc. (currently
            more than 60 item types - new ones are easily added). Personal notes,
            discussions, wiki pages, web links, images and geographic location can be added
            to any item in the database. Items can be cross-referenced.
        </p>

        <p>
            Heurist allows one to easily and quickly find, capture and
            share relevant information within workgroups, organise information resources
            and generate teaching/research project web site content automatically
            (including within most Content Management Systems and teaching systems such as WebCT). No programming skills are
            required.
        </p>

        <p>
            Some example web sites developed with content drawn from 
            Heurist include:
        </p>

        <ul>
            <li>University of Sydney Archaeology web site</li>
            <li><p>EARTH - Early Agricultural Remains and Technical Heritage (ESF-funded network)</p></li>
            <li><p>UNESCO Three Cities project web site</p></li>
            <li><p>Rethinking Timelines ARC Linkage project</p></li>
        </ul>
        <hr>

        <p><b>Full Description</b></p>

        <p>Heurist is a free online database service which stores:</p>

        <ul>
            <li>Internet bookmarks</li>
            <li>Bibliographic references</li>
            <li>
                Research data on other types of item such as
                descriptions of events, biographical records, sound recordings, photographs,
                historical maps, thesis topics, seminars etc. There are currently &gt;60 record 
                types and new ones are being added as people request them.
            </li>
        </ul>

        <p>
            Heurist aims to put all of these records at your fingertips
            in a single system available anywhere, rather than as a multiplicity of
            systems tied to specific computers.
        </p>

        <p>Some of the specific functions Heurist offers include:</p>

        <ul>
            <li>
                Immediate access to your personal collection of
                bookmarks bibliographic records, research data and notes in a
                standard web browser anywhere you have access to the Internet.
            </li>
            <li>
                Bookmark and tag (keyword) web pages and bibliographic
                references as you come across them, enter full bibliographic
                information (or import existing bibliographies or library searches).
            </li>
            <li>
                Add private, workgroup or public annotations in the form
                of notes, discussion and wiki pages to any record in the database.
                You can also attach images and multimedia.
            </li>
            <li>
                Create a personal home page which gives one-click access
                to all your most frequently used resources - add or remove them
                simply by adding or removing a keyword.
            </li>
            <li>
                Rapidly search your collection by keyword or free text
                search to re-locate web sites, bibliographic entries and research
                notes.
            </li>
            <li>
                Save complex searches with a user-defined name for
                re-use.
            </li>
            <li>
                Print out or export any search you do in a variety of
                formats, including bibliographic formats (new formats can be
                added by writing a stylesheet).
            </li>
            <li>
                Publish live search results to a web page (including web
                pages within the University CMS). Update the page simply by adding
                records to the database and keywording them to appear in a particular
                page.
            </li>
            <li>
                Publish search results as live interactive maps in
                TimeMap, Google Maps or Google Earth.
            </li>
            <li>   
                Discover records added by others (if public) through
                social bookmarking (following tagging patterns) or keyword/text
                searches, and add them to your personal collection.
            </li>
            <li>
                Send emails about one or several records to a person, or
                to all members of your workgroup(s), who can add these records
                to their personal collection with three clicks.
            </li>
            <li>
                Set triggers on records so that they send you or your workgroup(s) email reminders on
                a specified date or at specififed intervals.
            </li>
            <li>
                Make time-stamped connections between records in the
                database eg. connecting images or notes to bibliographic references.
                Has also been used for mapping a research network and for building a
                network of historical events.
            </li>
        </ul>

        <hr>

        <p><b>Nearly ready</b></p>

        <p>The following functions are under development and should be available in September 2007 </p>

        <ul>
            <li>Cite-As-You-Write function for Word</li>
            <li>
                Synchronisation with Zotero (a browser-based academic bookmarking
                and bibliographic system from George Mason University)
            </li>
        </ul>
        <hr>

        <p><b>For the more technical</b></p>

        <ul>
            <li>
                Social bookmarking functions to discover new information
                from user tagging.
            </li>
            <li>
                Generates RSS, GML and KML feeds from any specified
                search.
            </li>
            <li>
                All searches generate a generic XML feed which is
                restyled with XSLT and Cocoon. New XSLTs can be added or referenced
                externally.
            </li>
            <li>
                Wizard to build easily modified, complex PHP/MySQL
                online databases without programming. Uses same, or external, user authorisation database.
            </li>
            <li>
                Job tracking and work hours tracking systems linked to
                same user authorisation database
            </li>
        </ul>

        <hr>

        <p><b>Developers</b></p>

        <p>
            Heurist was developed from late 2005 for the SHSSERI (Sydney Humanities and Social Sciences
            e-Research Initiative) Research Cluster by Dr Ian 
            Johnson and staff of the Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of 
            Sydney.
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